Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Pocket reading list - Part 2

Well, going further back in time, here are 10 more favorites from my Pocket account. On another note, I really wish there were some sort of user metrics available from Pocket. For example, how long does it take for me to read an article vs average time, how long are my articles on an average, what time of the day do i read the articles and so on. Anyway, here goes -

The Real Landscapes of the Great Flood Myths - Most mythology has historic reasons behind it and this is the story of how geologists put together the events of the past, which were coincidentally paraphrased in the local mythology. I'm growing to love history as a subject and it's importance is slowly dawning on me.

La Vida Robot - A beautiful and inspiring story of school boys who came together, under the guidance of a school teacher, to compete in a national robotics championship, their struggles while designing the robot for the competition and ingenuity in building the robot.

High Tech - This is the story of how silicon valley entrepreneurs have started to revolutionize the marijuana industry in the US, of modern electric cigarettes to smoke marijuana and of medical marijuana research.

Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head: A Mosquito’s Lament - The world around us in unimaginably complicated and extremely beautiful and it's kind of sad how less we notice it anymore. I have honestly never asked myself how insects feel when it rains on them. Personally, I know friends who hate the rain but that's not because the rain drops hurt them. But if you think about it, given the small size of a mosquito, one would think that rain drops are a major nuisance. The article talks about what actually happens when a mosquito comes in contact with raindrops.

Can You Really Game Index Funds? - I still don't understand macroeconomics completely and I really really need to do a course. And no, not an online course! But every once in a while I come across brilliantly worded Bloomberg articles that explain some key concepts. I read Flash Boys earlier, which taught me a good amount too.

Shrimpocalypse: How reintroducing prawns could save humans from deadly disease - There's a very delicate balance which Nature has in place, until we can around and threw it off balance. And only once the ecosystem goes off balance do we know what the consequences are. In this article, the author talks about how reintroducing shrimps into the local ecosystem reduces harmful parasites, which have increased disease incidence in the nearby villages.

Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every 10 Minutes - I wonder how it is for an astronaut to sit in the space station (ISS) and look down on Earth, basking in it's magnificence. I follow quite a few astronauts, who regularly post pictures of earth they take from above the atmosphere. And this satellite pretty much does the same. Well it has a much better camera for one. And it focuses more on atmospheric and climatic activity than human populations.

How parole boards keep prisoners in the dark and behind bars - I don't know what the judicial process in India is and I don't know if there's such a thing as parole over here. But it's deeply disturbing how a group of people, most of whom don't have experience in the judicial system, get to decide if a prisoner is allowed to be released or not. And it's shameful how the media throws the blame at the parole boards when a prisoner released on parole only to commit more heinous crimes.

Labels

Popular posts from this blog

Animation using GNUPlotI've been trying to create an animation depicting a quasar spectrum moving across the 5 SDSS pass bands with respect to redshift. It is important to visualise what emission lines are moving in and out of bands to be able to understand the color-redshift plots and the changes in it.
I've tried doing this using the animate function in matplotlib, python but i wasn't able to make it work - meaning i worked on it for a couple of days and then i gave up, not having found solutions for my problems on the internet.
And then i came across this site, where the gunn-peterson trough and the lyman alpha forest have been depicted - in a beautiful manner. And this got me interested in using js and d3 to do the animations and make it dynamic - using sliders etc.
In the meanwhile, i thought i'd look up and see if there was a way to create animations in gnuplot and whoopdedoo, what do i find but nirvana!

For those of you who don't know, MOOC stands for Massively Open Online Course.

The internet is an awesome thing. It's making education free for all. Well, mostly free. But it's surprising at the width and depth of courses being offered online. And it looks like they are also having an impact on students, especially those from universities that are not top ranked. Students in all parts of the world can now get a first class education experience, thanks to courses offered by Stanford, MIT, Caltech, etc.

I'm talking about MOOCs because one of my new year resolutions is to take online courses, atleast 2 per semester (6 months). And I've chosen the following two courses on edX - Analyzing Big Data with Microsoft R Server and Data Science Essentials for now. I looked at courses on Coursera but I couldn't find any which was worthy and free. There are a lot more MOOC providers out there but let's start here. And I feel like the two courses are relevant to where I …

I just watched this brilliant keynote today. It's a commentary on Programmers and the software development industry/ecosystem as a whole.

I am not going to give you a tl;dr version of the talk because it is a talk that I believe everyone should watch, that everyone should learn from. Instead, I am going to give my own parallel-ish views on programmers and programming.
As pointed out in the talk, there are mythical creatures in the software development industry who are revered as gods. Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python, was given the title Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL). People flock around the creators of popular languages or libraries. They are god-like to most programmers and are treated like gods. By which, I mean to say, we assume they don't have flaws. That they are infallible. That they are perfect.
And alongside this belief in the infallibility of these Gods, we believe that they were born programmers. That programming is something that people are born wit…